


into the silent land

by SerenePanic



Series: VLD Angst Week 2017 [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-22
Updated: 2017-03-22
Packaged: 2018-10-09 07:58:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10407465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenePanic/pseuds/SerenePanic
Summary: Pidge was finally, finally ready to be Katie, again. To have her family back.





	

**Author's Note:**

> title from Christina Rossetti's "Remember"
> 
> Part of VLD Angst Week.
> 
> March 22nd: Heartbreak.

It's been four years since that last dinner.

Four years since the Holts were together, a family.

Three years since Katie left Earth.

Two years since she and the others had found Matt, part of a rebel group, skinny, cautious, and so much angrier than she remembered him, but Matt, alive all the same.

He'd slipped into the castle like he was one of them the whole time, joking with Lance, sparring with Keith, helping out Hunk, listening to Coran, and teasing Katie like he'd never left.

Katie was so, incredibly grateful. She'd missed him--even his terrible jokes.

And now, finally, four long years since she'd seen him last, they finally had a lead on her father. Finally, she would be able to see him again, and tell him everything he'd missed—becoming Pidge, Voltron, all of it. They had everything documented and planned accordingly--from Sam's history of prison transfers to his medical record to his current location and his work schedule for the next eight quintants.

There was nothing that could stop her now.

(Except, of course, the unexpected wrench in her plans called "Katie Had to Get It Somewhere".)

They had had everything planned. Matt, Shiro, and Katie had done their damnedest to make sure that everything was accounted for, that there would be nothing to mess things up this late in the game.

They hadn't counted on Sam planning his own coup, and they hadn't counted on that coup occurring earlier than planned because one of the guards had caught wind of it.

They hadn't planned on arriving to find the entire prison population slaughtered after the coup failed.

They hadn't counted on Katie being the one to find her father's corpse.

(Nobody wanted to remember how she had screamed, because even if she was hardened by war and the years, she was only seventeen, she had seen this in her nightmares too often, and she just wanted her father to hold her, and now he never would.)

They just…hadn’t planned on any of this, and now none of it _mattered_. Sam Holt was gone, and Katie and Matt were still here.

Matt had refused to leave Katie’s side for days afterwards, clinging to her hand tightly. He’d known in was possible, of course—but by the end, as it grew nearer and their plans grew more solid and nothing had changed, he’d finally let himself hope, and now all there was left for him to do was make sure his sister stayed here, with him, and didn’t go anywhere he couldn’t follow.

Katie just felt like everything was a haze—horrible and grey and numb and aching in her soul. How…she’d gone to space, she’d left her mother _to find her father and Matt_ and now she had Matt, yes, but her father was _gone_ and how would she explain this to her mother? Oh god, her mother. They…they had to go home. They had to tell her, for certain, that her husband was never coming back. She deserved to know that at the very least Matt and Katie were still alive. She…she had to tell her mother that she had failed.

Katie had thought she’d run out of tears, but she was wrong.

She wasn’t really a child—not anymore, not really—but at this moment, all she wanted were her parents, but for very different reasons, she couldn’t have either.

And so she clung to Matt just as tightly as he clung to her, and she shut out everyone else.

They were like family, too, and she knew it was too real a danger that one of them would die too, and she couldn’t bear it if anyone else left.

She just wanted to go home.


End file.
